Aaron Kohn’s African Lookbook interview with David Goldblatt covers a wide swath of subject matter—from childhood experiences, how he began working as a photographer after his father’s death, and why he was never cut out to be a “political” photographer (because “I am a coward,” he says, and because “I’m interested in the underbelly” of […]
Remember that little video campaign called #Kony2012? Yeah, we wish we could forget too. Few videos have reached the magnitude of pestilence that the non-profit Invisible Children’s video achieved this year. By transforming a complex regional crisis involving the Lord’s Resistance Army into a simple, manufactured (and in some ways factually false) narrative about the […]
Struggles over memory are commonplace in contemporary South Africa. The 1980s are an especially contested part of its past. That decade witnessed a mass resurgence of popular struggles that picked up a thread of civil opposition going back to the 1976 Soweto uprising. From outside South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) stepped up its armed struggle and sanctions campaigns; inside the country the United Democratic […]
Yesterday, Goodman Gallery emailed a press release to its huge recipient list, announcing a “joint settlement with [the] ANC.” After closed meetings, conducted in “order to establish common ground and a basis for resolution” in which all parties strove “to strike a balance” between maligned factions “in a spirit of amicability,” the Gallery felt it […]
Between the relentless media coverage, the twitter deluge, the pronouncement by a South African judge (“This is a matter of great national importance”), and declarations by the South African President’s daughters about “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” you might be forgiven for thinking that–finally–some urgency about South Africa’s big issues was making national […]
In his book Art and The End of Apartheid, John Peffer writes about the Medu Art Ensemble: “For them a true culture of the people would be one that was not exclusive to the elite of the world of art galleries, but was seen in the streets, on T-shirts and posters (…).” There is thus […]
